Writing from Lived Experience #Own Voices

How important is personal experience when writing about a marginalised or under-represented community?

What does ‘Own Voices’ mean?

‘Own Voices’ was a twitter hashtag created by Corinne Duyvis in 2015, as follows: ‘Glad important discussions are being had. Would love to be able to walk away with book recommendations. How about a hashtag? #ownvoices, to recommend kidlit about diverse characters written by authors from that same diverse group.’ Since this tweet, Own Voices has come to represent personal experience when creating something about a marginalised or under-represented community. In this post, I’ll also be referring to the ‘observer’s perspective’ as someone writing about a marginalised community from an outside perspective – not a member of that community.

What is the ‘debate’ about Own Voices?

In 2020, Bernardine Evaristo spoke about writing her nonbinary character in Girl, Woman, Other from an observer’s perspective, as being nonbinary was ‘completely beyond [her] experience.’

Evaristo said she wanted to write a nonbinary character to give herself ‘freedom to be as creative as I wanted to’. She said she was ‘aware that it was a risk, but I also feel that I’m completely entitled to any story I want… and if there are consequences to that, I will deal with them but I’m not going to be scared off… there is no right or wrong.’

This popularly held belief that we should have total freedom to write whatever we want may seem empowering and ethically defensible on the surface, but often disguises the damaging effects that misrepresentation and incorrect information can have on a marginalised community. We might feel ‘entitled’ to write any story, but should we? Shouldn’t we be open to the impact of our writing, in order to be responsible writers?

An Observer's Perspective

Stereotypes

Marginalised communities have been, and are still, damaged by misrepresentation and stereotype. Whether well-meaning or not, the observer’s gaze is often riddled with inaccuracies and can damage the very community it tries to help. Infamously, Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, written by a white American about a Mexican migrant, received criticism because it contains ‘harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama.’ Nesrine Malik has said that it attempts to ‘cover the saga of a migrant without even addressing the wider context of migration or inequality.’

Stories that rely on stereotype may initially seem less controversial because they skim the surface of wide-spread culturally held beliefs, but surely it’s better to aspire to capturing a truth, however challenging that might be? Unfortunately, this isn’t so easy for Own Voice writers when the true reality and complexities of our stories are often criticised for not being ‘universal’, hard to promote, dark and depressing. Own Voice writers are often put in the position of having to pander to stereotype in order to have their work accepted. Alisa Zipursky writes, ‘I again ask myself whether going after bigger outlets in order to destigmatize our experiences and making us be seen in mainstream places, is worth the price of compromising my storytelling boundaries.’

Trauma-Porn

Another issue with stories written from an observers perspective can be the motivations behind them. Although interest in marginalised experience is a good thing, sometimes this interest begins to focus too much on the ‘tragic’ side of the marginalised experience, which can lead to ‘trauma-porn’. 

What is trauma-porn? Alisa Zipursky says:

‘It is the exploitive sharing of the darkest, creepiest, most jarring parts of our trauma specifically for the purpose of shocking others.’ 

Think of a true crime programme. Did the narration focus on making the event/s as terrible and horrifically immersive as possible? Did it paint single-note ‘victims’ rather than fully-rounded people? Did we see any representation of how survivor/s might rebuild their lives after the traumatic experience?

After digging into Sarah Crossan’s motivations for her story One, I found an interview where she says she chose to write about conjoined siblings because of a ‘dark fascination’. Crossan shares in this interview that she didn’t speak to any conjoined-twins before writing her verse novel, that the bulk of her research was watching documentaries created and directed by other observers of the experience. Despite this, One has become one of the top suggested novel for young people on conjoined-twins, and Crossan even won the Carnegie Medal for it. During my creative writing degree, this book was taught and upheld as a prime example of good writing for young people. There was no critical discussion into why Crossan wrote about an experience so wholly outside of her own, or any question about the authenticity of this representation.

Writing Responsibly

Instead of appropriating an experience with little first-hand research, Crossan could have delved into a truer work on why she has such a ‘dark fascination’ for writing about marginalised suffering. Observers interested in marginalised stories will have a perspective on, or even participatory experience in the kind of discrimination they want to write about. So why not narrate from the observers perspective?

Sometimes writers will avoid writing diverse characters because they are afraid of doing it wrong. This well-meaning absence is sometimes defended as ‘giving space’ to marginalised voices – but we can all have a seat at the table. Discrimination is not something only experienced by marginalised people, it is built into our culture and affects us all. For example, if you are aware of systemic racism as a white person and wish to make change, why not talk about your own race anxiety? By avoiding talking or writing about marginalisation, there’s more pressure on marginalised writers to educate and inform – many of whom would much rather have the freedom to write freely.

If you do want to centralise a marginalised story, research is crucial. First hand testimony and interviews, asking questions to marginalised communities on online forums, reading Own Voice creators in different forms like educational resources, memoir, poetry, fantasy, etc, is key to providing good representation. Then after you’ve written a few drafts, why not send out your manuscript to a sensitivity reader or two? This can really help find those sentences that need updated terminology, or stop a stereotype in its tracks before it gets too close to your final draft.

Once you’ve decided to include someone from a marginalised community in your writing, it worth figuring out how much detail you’ll give to sharing their experiences. It might be necessary to include the facets and intricacies of that character’s marginalised experience if they are a central character, but if not, these kinds of details might be unnecessary. Background marginalised characters are often stereotyped (see below), so investing some time into researching what these stereotypes are, and what kinds of representation the community would like, can carry a huge impact – not matter how small the character.

Examples of What to Avoid

A visibly physically disabled character acts a source of inspiration for other, able-bodied, characters.

A disabled person isn’t there for gratuitous inspiration, nor should they be a plot device to make a main character feel grateful for what they have in comparison. (Watch: Jessica’s video on Inspiration Porn.)

The Autistic character is a white boy who is rude and lacks empathy.

This common stereotype of how Autistic person look and behave disregards the vast variety in age, race, gender, sexuality, and cognitive difference within the autistic community. These portrayals also often fail to address important issues within the community, like how masking impacts Autistic people – see the character of ‘Quinn’ in TV series Heartbreak High (2022) for good representation of this. (Read: Will Mandy talks Masking.)

A person of colour with a name uncommon to the dialect of the area has no problem taking on a nickname so the (often white) characters don’t have to go through the effort of learning their name.

This racist micro-aggression can be upsetting on many different levels, but these negative feelings are often not addressed in media or in real life. (Read: Snéha Khilay on having a ‘foreign-sounding’ name in Britain.)

How many books or films you’ve consumed centre marginalised experience? How many of them were actually written by an Own Voice? You may be surprised to find out how many stories about marginalisation are told from an observer’s gaze. It might be worth reading reviews of these stories by someone with personal experience, for example: Riki Entz reviews Rules.

Own Voice Recommendations

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

This sci-novel envelops us in the world of Aster, as they work secretly as a doctor aboard the space vessel HSS Matilda. Here, the prisoners on the lowdeck try to survive their oppressors. Through their trauma and shrinking freedoms, we get an authentic look at the difficulty of remaining hopeful in the face of systemic oppression. The characters were incredibly real, I felt like I knew them, and it was the best portrayal of neurodivergence I've seen in a novel! Highly recommend :)

Quote: "Sadness twisted up inside her like a rope or maybe like a snake or maybe like a rosary. Whatever it was, this gangly sorrow, it had tied itself around Aster's vertebrae and would remain quite a long while."

I May Destroy You by Michaela Coel

This comedy-drama series centres around Arabella, a writer who has recently experienced sexual assault. We follow her as she goes on a journey to redefine consent, see her trauma interact with her art, and face an apathetic and dismissive public. This series was expertly written and performed by Coel. It was an intense rollercoaster of emotions and made me personally re-evaluate my past sexual experiences and my consent in those situations, as it has done, and will continue to do for whoever watches it.